Ford Racing Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Hollywood Casino 400 Media Availability — Kansas Speedway
Saturday, September 26, 2026
Ford Racing’s NASCAR Cup Series drivers visited the Kansas Speedway media center ahead of Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400. Joey Logano will sit on the pole position for tomorrow’s race by virtue of NASCAR’s metric after both practice and qualifying were rained out.
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Mustang Dark Horse – “In a perfect world, we would have gotten to practice and it rained out qualifying. I thought we were practicing and qualifying when I showed up at the race track this morning. The radar looked pretty good and the forecast didn’t look that bad either. I thought ‘we are going to have to do it the hard way today’. I guess it rained just enough. The curiosity is going to get the best of me and I am going to want to know what we’ve got. But I can wait one more night. I will be OK. I know last time we were here we didn’t have a solid run but we have been solid here in years past. Do I think we are better off than the last time we were here just from what we brought? Yes. Are we a lot smarter than we were in the Spring? Yes. All those things point me towards having some confidence. But, with that said, it doesn’t mean everyone else wasn’t working. Where we really stack up will be interesting to see but we will all find out tomorrow together.”
WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO RISK TO PUT YOURSELF IN POSITION TO COLLECT STAGE POINTS? “You kind of have to look at it as what kind of car do you have that day. If you take those points and you bury yourself; like the scenario that happened last year at Bristol. We chose to take stage points in the first stage and bury ourselves. But, we knew we had a solid enough car that we felt like we could get something in the second stage. If you are racing purely for the win and not for points, you’d give up that first stage to position yourself better for the rest of the race. If you are leading the race and you have ten stage points sitting in front of you, it is pretty hard not to take those; especially early in the race when you still have time to come back.”
HOW CURIOUS ARE YOU ABOUT HOW THE WEEKEND WILL GO IN COMPARISON TO EARLIER IN THE SEASON? “I am a little more optimistic because all the races that were bad in the spring have been better. I am pretty curious about here in Kansas. I am optimistic that we will be close. I don’t know that we are going to be the fastest car but I think we can be close enough to take advantage of any opportunities.”
A LOT OF PEOPLE WILL LOOK AT THE RESULTS FROM THIS RACE AND THINK THIS IS HOW YOU WILL RUN AT VEGAS AND CHARLOTTE. WHO TRUE DO YOU THINK THAT WILL BE? “Half true. Yes, there are a lot of similarities, because the speed that you bring to a track like this is going to show up at the next two. But the tracks are still a little bit different, and we’ve seen with this Next Gen car that it just takes a little bit to be off, right? You can just be a little bit off, and you’re running 20th versus fifth. It doesn’t take much.”
YOU ARE THE LAST FORD DRIVER TO WIN HERE AT KANSAS SPEEDWAY. THAT WAS IN THE GEN SIX CAR. WHERE HAVE YOU SEEN IMPROVEMENTS IN THE GEN SEVEN CAR THAT YOU FEEL LIKE YOU CAN COMPETE AGAINST THE TOYOTAS AND THE CHEVROLETS AT KANSAS. “I hope we are. I hope we can [compete]. We’ll see what kind of gains we have made. The thing is, everyone can make gains, so you don’t really know, right? There’s some things that stand out to me. It’s like, ‘oh, this should be better, that should be better.’ Okay, we should be in the hunt, but it’s not like the competition has been sitting on their hands, either. They’ve been doing things too. We don’t know what their gains are. We know where they’re beating us, but assuming, again, it’s been a few months, assuming they’ve worked on some things, too, to get even better. You know, surely they’re not going to be any worse.”
YOU’VE MADE HUGE GAINS IN THE POINTS. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON STAGE POINTS? “You can finish fifth with no stage points and it’s hard to call it a good day. You know, back in the old Chase, without the stages, you’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, top five was pretty good’, you know, that’s what you need to do throughout the Chase. Now a top five is not enough. You have to score stage points.”
HOW”S THE MOMENTUM THESE DAYS IN TERMS OF HOW IT IMPACTS THE SPRING IN THE STEP FOR THE TEAM AS WELL? “Momentum is just confidence. You hope to ride that as long as you can. We are on a good little hot streak here over the last ten plus weeks. We’ve pulled us from 20th in points to third. So, I’m proud of that, proud of that effort. We’ve got ourselves close but it’s a long season though.”
DO YOU LOOK BACK TO WHAT HAPPENED AT KANSAS IN THE SPRING IN TERMS OF WHERE YOU NEED TO BE BETTER? “I didn’t want to, but I did. Yes. We try to learn as quickly as possible and move on. Think about the good stuff again.”
RYAN PREECE, No. 60 Dillon’s/Celsius Ford Mustang Dark Horse – WHAT ARE YOUR FEELINGS ON STAGE POINTS? “I’m just a purest. I understand why we did stage points, and why we wanted to reward them. But you can always play devil’s advocate to everything. And you can always find one, and in my situation, we’re not getting, you know, five, ten points per stage. But we are executing finishers. But that is just the format we’re in, though. So, in that situation, we need to keep working to find ways to be better in that regard. But, yeah, I wish there was more of a reward for finishing races rather than rewarding stage points. Then, if you happen to have a bad finish, whether it be an unfortunate situation or your own decision, those guys that can max out stage points, and then not finish a race, it still saves their championship goals.”
DO YOU FEEL LIKE THIS FORMAT IS REWARDING THE EVENTUAL RIGHT CHAMPION AND HOW WE GET THERE? “Yeah. I do. This happens in every sport. Somebody could be hot all year long, and then if they’re not, at the right time, they are not going to win it. So it’s still about executing. The way I look at it is, we all know the rules. We all know the game going into it. The rules haven’t been changed. You gotta execute the final ten races. That’s the most important part. I think that this system is the closest we’ve been since the hay days of racing all season.”
